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NetworkManager (Mangler?)
by Mark Rogers 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

Now I have my new PC up and running it of-course comes with NetworkManager, which I've always avoided in the past but maybe it's improved? My problem is that it seems inflexible and buggy; I just got into a right old mess by not making sure I had "disconnected" my LAN before making some changes (result: NM reporting that I'm connected using a configuration that no longer exists, and refusing to connect to my new one even though it said it was). On the other hand, having a GUI interface to LAN/WLAN/VPN/etc would be nice and I'd prefer to make it work if it can be done. So, ditch it or keep it? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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ATA secure erase
by Mark Rogers 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Does anyone have any experience of using the ATA secure erase commands from hdparm? My understanding is that a BIOS can lock the drive from responding to the commands, and that some do and some don't. Mine appears to (hdparm -I /dev/sda shows "frozen" in the "Security" section), but I don't know how common it is to find a BIOS that allows this to work. I have several drives to wipe and I'd certainly consider building a PC for the job but I have no idea how to find out if a BIOS will let me do it before I buy it. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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xcompmgr help
by Simon Royal 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Hi I am still experiencing Linux Mint 9 LXDE graphical problems. ALUG member Martin suggested it was an OpenBox problem and not an LXDE problem. I have kind of sorted the problem, but not permanently. If I run 'xcompmgr' from the terminal the graphical glitches and blips disappear and everything is fine. However, the minute I close the terminal it must stop xcompmgr running as the problems come back. So, firstly how do I run it without having terminal open all the time and how do I automatically run it - I read something about autostart.sh. Regards Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Date formatting in OOo writer
by Mark Rogers 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Does anyone have an idea how to insert a date field into an OOo writer document, and format it along the lines of: Wednesday, 11th August, 2010 It's the "th" (or "st", "nd") I'm having the problem with. Seems unlikely it's not there but the examples don't show it and a Google has so far failed me (I can't even find people asking the question!) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Correct zone file set-up for mail to my home server
by Chris G 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

I send (some) E-Mail direct to my home server machine using SMTP, I used to do this using a sub-domain of my domain isbd.net which is hosted at Gradwell. I added a CNAME record for 'home' to the zone file for isbd.net and gave my static ADSL address as the value for this record. Thus mail forwarded to 'chris(a)home.isbd.net' arrived at my home server machine (subject to NAT forwarding and firewall of course) and was delivered by postfix to user chris. I now have a dedicated domain for my home server(s) and I'm struggling to get things working. The new domain is zbmc.eu, I have set up the zone file at the domain hosting as follows:- imap 10800 IN CNAME access.mail.gandi.net. www 10800 IN CNAME zbmc.eu. smtp 10800 IN CNAME relay.mail.gandi.net. pop 10800 IN CNAME access.mail.gandi.net. blog 10800 IN CNAME blogs.vip.gandi.net. webmail 10800 IN CNAME agent.mail.gandi.net. @ 10800 IN A 84.45.228.40 @ 10800 IN MX 10 mws.zbmc.eu. mws 10800 IN CNAME zbmc.eu. (Most of this is unchanged from the default setup of course) The 'www' CNAME entry is working fine, going to www.zbmc.eu shows my web pages (or more my lack of web pages!). I'm not at all convinced that I have the MX record right yet though, nor am I convinced that I actually need that 'mws' CNAME record. Could I just set the MX record to:- @ 10800 IN MX 10 zbmc.eu. Can one of the alug gurus elucidate please. ... and do I *need* a second MX (backup) record or will the sending SMTP server just back off and try again if my server is down for a short while? -- Chris Green

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S-Video poutput port on laptop
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

Hi Folks, If anyone has info on how to activate the S-Video "mini-DIN" port on the side of my laptop[s] I'd be grateful to hear! The purpose is to connect the video output to a video recorder. I have an appropriate cable. One laptop (the preferred candidate) is a Compaq Presario A900. The other is an Advent 8117. Both are running Debian as native OS.. There is also another Advent 8117 running Debian as guest OS in VirtualBox, host OS = Windows XP. I might be forced to use this one ... Tbanks for any info. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Aug-10 Time: 22:56:25 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Correct zone file set-up for mail to my home server
by Martin A. Brooks 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

On Mon, August 9, 2010 15:01, Chris G wrote: > I'm not at all convinced that I have the MX record right yet though, nor am I convinced that I actually need that 'mws' CNAME record. Could I just set the MX record to:- > > @ 10800 IN MX 10 zbmc.eu. > Your MX records should never be a CNAME. > ... and do I *need* a second MX (backup) record or will the sending SMTP server just back off and try again if my server is down for a short while? No, you don't. -- Martin A. Brooks http://antibodyMX.net/ - antispam & antivirus email filtering.

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Simple todo manager
by Mark Rogers 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

Any suggestions for a simple to-do manager, ideally for Gnome? I just started playing with gToDo, which isn't bad, but it has a few bugs and it looks like it's not being maintained any more. All I want is something I can add some 1-line "jobs" to, with somewhere I can add more detail if I need to (ie a comment field of some kind), some way to categorise and prioritise, and ideally the ability to set a date/time for jobs that triggers a reminder of some kind. Too many jobs are getting forgotten about, and my old "system" of leaving the relevant email unread in my inbox isn't working.... I think I also need the satisfaction of being able to tick things off to get me motivated to do some of the less interesting jobs! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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MMB iPlayer -- no sound
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

Greetings All! Yesterday I downloaded (with automatic installation) the BBC iPlayer Desktop to a Debian Lennie; this also brought in with it the Adobe AIR (whatever that is). I then used this to download a programme from BBC 2 TV. On playback of the now downloaded main programme using the iPlayer, the video is OK, but the is no sound. Investigation of what has been stored shows a biggish (300MB) MP4 file (30-min programme, 10MB/min). There is also in an adjacent subdirectory a small MP3 file which plays the BBC2 logo (about 10 seconds); this one does play with sound. With iPlayer, it comes up, with sound, just before the main feature with no sound. So sound from the MP3, no sound from the MP4. Playing the MP3 with totem is fine. Attempts to play the MP4 with totem fail. Nothing happens, There is a message: The playback of this movie requires a audio/x-gst-fourcc-enca decoder video/x-gst-fourcc-encv decoder plugin which is not installed. and I cannot find this anywhere (probably built-in to iPlayer). The sound system on this machine seems to be ALSA. This normally works fine. Any suggestions for progress will be most welcome! With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Aug-10 Time: 10:53:35 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Martin I shall look for some info for OpenBox rather than LXDE. I did find someone with the same problem on the same machine using Xubuntu, but there is an option in Xubuntu that resolves this, there isnt one Ican see in LXDE. The chipset is a SMI LynxEM+ which is Silicon Motion. I dont think it is a Xorg configuration problem, as I copied someone elses who runs Xubuntu on their 240x and I dont get it in Ubuntu. It has to be a WM/DE thing. Simon Royal PS. Thanks for your help earlier. I have been using it for a couple of hours and it is ripping along without a power supply in. ---------------------------------------- > Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 21:24:13 +0100 > Subject: Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please > From: mobile.sea(a)gmail.com > To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk > > I have no experience with LXDE but try opening up a terminal and typing: > > compiz --replace > > Assuming compiz is installed that should enable display compositing > BUT here is a quote from a user forum: > > ##QUOTE### > Does Compiz work on/with LXDE? > > Compiz is a window manager. LXDE is a desktop enironment, meaning it's > a collection of software that makes up a 'desktop', including a window > manager, Openbox. Installing Compiz on top of LXDE will simply discard > Openbox in favour of Compiz. Mind you, Compiz will drag som many Gnome > dependencies in with it that you might as well have installed Gnome > but as Troy McClure said to Dolores Montenegro in "Calling All > Quakers": "Have it your way, Baby!!" > ###END QUOTE### > > Maybe you should google again your display problems but replace LXDE > with Openbox. As I assume the display problems are an Openbox issue > rather than an LXDE issue. It could of course be your xorg > configuration. Is it a SiS graphics chip? You could also google on the > chipset as that might give you some xorg parameters to try? > > Good luck. > > Martin > > On 8 August 2010 17:30, Simon Royal wrote: >> >> Martin >> >> >> Thanks for that. Excellent. I found the option in the BIOS and it has sorted it. >> >> >> Simon Royal >> >> >> --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. >> --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. >> >> >> >> Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 09:40:10 +0100 >> Subject: Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please >> From: mobile.sea(a)gmail.com >> To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk >> >> The slow down when running off battery is (from distant memory), a power saving function of those IBM 240s where it underclocks the processor to half it's original speed. I think it can be turned off in the BIOS. Many kernels ago there may have even been a driver in the kernel for this. >> >> Rgds, >> Martin >> On Aug 8, 2010 12:30 AM, "Simon Royal" wrote: >> >> >> >> Hi >> >> >> >> Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? >> >> >> >> I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. >> >> >> >> >> You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. >> >> >> >> I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. >> >> >> >> He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. >> >> >> >> He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. >> >> >> >> >> I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. >> >> >> >> Simon Royal >> >> >> >> >> >> --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. >> >> >> --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> >> main(a)lists.alug.org.uk >> >> http://www.alug.org.uk/ >> >> http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main >> >> Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> main(a)lists.alug.org.uk >> http://www.alug.org.uk/ >> http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main >> Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >>

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Ubuntu login problem
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

(I've been having problems posting to the list - apologies if this appears multiple times!) Hi! Can anyone help? I've got Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - the Lucid Lynx installed, and I rebooted it today, because it seemed a bit sluggish, bit sluggish, and ever since I've had problems logging in and/or authenticating. The only thinks I recall changing are there were a few updates downloaded, and I'd tweaked my Samba config file (smb.conf) and also been playing with the nvidia driver settings, enabling it and disabling it. This machine's a server, and it controls it's own logins, i.e. it doesn't authorise them somewhere else. When I reboot it, I see the greeter, I type in my password, and then it sits there for ages - at least a minute, before I see the logged in desktop. I can try switching to a virtual console (alt-f1 etc) and logging in there, and it takes ages and usually times out (timeout after 60 seconds message). It also happens if I try to ssh into the machine. Once the machine has been up for a while, the login response on a virtual terminal seems to be better, but I also get the problem using SUDO. I also get the problem logging in to Thunderbird on this machine, which uses IMAP to get the mail of this machine, and uses PAM to authenticate. I've looked in the logs and can't see anything obviously wrong. ISTM that this is a problem with PAM authentication, but I've not changed anything, nor do I know what to do about it or what to change. I've installed Bootchart, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that. Any ideas? Regards Steve

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Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Martin Thanks for that. Excellent. I found the option in the BIOS and it has sorted it. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 09:40:10 +0100 Subject: Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please From: mobile.sea(a)gmail.com To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk The slow down when running off battery is (from distant memory), a power saving function of those IBM 240s where it underclocks the processor to half it's original speed. I think it can be turned off in the BIOS. Many kernels ago there may have even been a driver in the kernel for this. Rgds, Martin On Aug 8, 2010 12:30 AM, "Simon Royal" <simonroyal(a)live.co.uk> wrote: Hi Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Martin Thanks for that. Excellent. I found the option in the BIOS and it has sorted it. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010 09:40:10 +0100 Subject: Re: [ALUG] Linux Mint Help Please From: mobile.sea(a)gmail.com To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk The slow down when running off battery is (from distant memory), a power saving function of those IBM 240s where it underclocks the processor to half it's original speed. I think it can be turned off in the BIOS. Many kernels ago there may have even been a driver in the kernel for this. Rgds, Martin On Aug 8, 2010 12:30 AM, "Simon Royal" <simonroyal(a)live.co.uk> wrote: Hi Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Bubba2 server
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Has anyone any experience with one of these? We have just bought one out of some grant funding at a small charity, and so far have done no more than unpack it. It is about the size of a thick mass market paperback, very solidly made. Its running Debian, Etch apparently, and the main reason we bought it rather than build our own, one is very very low power consumption, and two, it comes totally set up with web server, NAS, picture gallery app and so on. The suppliers intend for you to use it as a firewall/router in addition, but we will be using it strictly as a server. Power consumption is minimal, its meant to be a plug in and forget package. Came with a 500G hard drive. We could have got a bigger disk, but it seemed like it would probably be smarter to have an external usb for the extra storage and greater redundancy. Ours is the non-wireless version, you can get them with wireless also. Price 240 Euro. Peter

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Linux Mint Help Please
by Simon Royal 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Hi Can someone offer some help on my problems using Linux Mint LXDE? I installed it on my ThinkPad 240x via another machine. Initially I had some X problems, but I have resolved them. However, I am still getting some odd screen problems where it is drawing multiple icons and buttons - like the maximise/minimise buttons - all over the screen. You can 'wipe' them off by moving a window, but they randomly pop up. I found one other person who had this problem, however he was using Xubuntu. I too had the same problems under Xubuntu 9.10, but not under Ubuntu 10.04. He resolved them by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager, but Mint Linux uses LXDE and I cannot find anything in the menus for this. He also mentioned that when running off battery the whole machine was slower - very noticeably slower - than when it is running off power adapter. Everyone else on the forum said this wasn't possible, but I have been experiencing this too. I would really like to get over this graphics problem without switching distros as I like Mint. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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a deeply puzzling overheating
by Peter Alcibiades 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Any ideas on this? Its a socket 754 machine, something like a 2Ghz Athlon, 1G memory. Debian Squeeze. It has always worked just fine, and in almost all ways except this still does. What has just now started happening however is that the owner has started to read the papers online. Sometimes, it doesn't seem to matter which paper or which browser, there will be a page with 'the wrong kind' of graphics. Its not clear exactly what the wrong kind is, some are fine, others seem not to be. Gradually, the fan will start to speed up. If you now start up gkrell, you can see that cpu temperature starts to rise quite rapidly to the high 50s, and the fan gets very loud indeed. I don't know how far it would go, because one of us closes the browser fairly soon when this happens, and eventually the temperature falls to below 50. It does not do it when displaying pictures. For instance, one can load in a file of a few hundred, and it will display the thumbnails fine, and then one can page through them repeatedly, they come up an display quite fast, and there's no problem. It does do it when rendering some pdfs. Particularly, it did it with a graphics intensive pdf of some sort. I thought about getting a better cpu cooler, this is the stock one, but there is very little space in these smallish cases. And I can't see why this should be happening. I have other barebones of this sort, Asus, and it never does. Another machine is an old 754, and it does not happen on it. I'm not completely sure if this is new, because I'm not sure whether this sort of graphic content was displayed previously. Meanwhile, there's a Novatech small form factor i3 machine at 400 which is looking more and more attractive.... Bought one for someone else, they are fairly compact, quite quiet, and run very cool. 754 is pretty old hat nowadays, so maybe its time. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] Copying SD cards
by Anthony Anson 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Chris Walker wrote: > On 04/08/10 17:05, Anthony Anson wrote: >> Chris Walker wrote: >>> Apologies if this appears twice - I posted it to the wrong address, >>> having already posted it using the wrong email address! >>> >>> I've copied one 2GB SD card to another 2GB card using the dd command >>> (having copied it to the hard drive as an intermediate step). >>> >>> The original card will load up in the desired device - a TomTom sat >>> nav but the second card won't. Is there any way for me to check that >>> the cards are the same? >>> >>> Also, and I realise that it's a bit OT here (although the TomTom is a >>> linux device!) but does anybody have any ideas what might be wrong >>> with the card? >> >> ISTR having a similar promble with a Kingston memory stick - it had a >> separate partition with uselessware in it, and it waas written in a >> (IIRC) NT format. >> >> Using violent methods under Debian, I deleted the contents of this >> partition then the partition itself. (It wouldn't go, all in one lump) >> >> After that, the copy worked as per original. > > But wouldn't the DD command overwrite everything on the SD card > including the partitions? Strangely, it didn't. I also tried reformatting it, and it ignored the partition. I think it's because the partition has a different drive address. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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enable display compositing in lxde
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi I have been having some bizarre graphical glitches in Linux Mint LXDE and so far haven't been able to find anyone else with the same problems nor a fix for it. Until now. 'the minimise/maximise/close window icons appear in random places all over the screen when I roll over them. When I move a window over them they dissapear (as if i was erasing them)' I have this exact problem. He appears to be using Xubuntu - I too had the same problem in Xubuntu last night. Oddly enough it didn't do this in Ubuntu. Anyway, he fixed it by 'enabling display compositing' under xfce 4 settings manager. Great, but I am using the LXDE version of Linux Mint and cant find this anywhere. Can anyone offer help or an alternative way of enabling display compositing? Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Mint Is Working... Few Graphical Glitches
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi Well, I found a work around. It seems xorg.conf was configured for the machine Mint was installed on. Moving the hard drive confused Mint as it didnt detect the new drivers/graphics. Luckily I found someone else who has Xubuntu installed on their 240X and they posted their xorg.conf online. So I nanoed in safe boot and replaced the contents of mine with theirs. This worked and I am not booted into Linux Mint LXDE on my ThinkPad 240X. It has a few graphical issues where it doesnt redraw things properly, like it hangs onto window buttons and prints them all over the screen. But I am sure this is a problem I can get round. Anyone have any ideas what this is and how to stop it. It is quite hard to describe. When you open up a window that has the close/maximise/minimise options sometimes these are repeated lots of times all over the screen. Fingers crossed I can get this sorted. After the long haul of getting this machine to dual boot I am just about there at having a fully working set up. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Mint Problems
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi I tried installing Linux Mint LXDE on my ThinkPads hard drive via a different laptop. This seemed the easiest way. It went ok and grub works fine. Back in my ThinkPad XP still works fine. Mint boots but then gets stuck. It sits on a black screen with some white text saying: Exporting directories for NFS daemon. Starting NFS kernel daemon. Starting NTP server ntpd. Starting common unix printing system cupsd. This stays on the screen. Every 20 seconds the whole screen goes black then the writing comes back. It doesnt get any further than this. If I do recovery mode then it will boot to a linux prompt. Any ideas? I am assuming this is something hardware related. Something to do with it being set up for the other machine. Is there a way of getting it to redetect hardware? Simon -- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Distro Oddness Possible Driver Issue
by Simon Royal 06 Aug '10

06 Aug '10

Hi Bear with me this could be a long email. As you know I have a ThinkPad 240X. It dual boots XP and Linux. I originally had Linux Mint on this ThinkPad as it was already installed on a hard drive, but it had graphical glitches. So I installed XP and then put Linux Mint LXDE on it, via removing the hard drive and installing it in another machine with an optical drive. With the hard drive back in the ThinkPad, Mint would boot properly with all sorts of errors. So I took the drive out and put it back in the other laptop and installed Ubuntu 10 using the alternative installer. I put it back in the ThinkPad and it booted perfectly and ran lovely, albiet slowly. So I thought lets try Xubuntu as it is a bit less resource hungry. So once again I took out the hard drive, popped it in my other laptop and installed Xubuntu 9.10 via regular cd. Once done, I took out the hard drive and stuck it back in the ThinkPad. It worked, took a while to boot and has some graphical glitches, such as repeating window icons (like maximise, close etc). I am assuming this is a driver issue. I had the same problem with Mint, but not Ubuntu. Any ideas how I can get round this annoying graphics glitch. I am currently updating Xubuntu to 10.04 (which is going to take about 5 hours apparently) to see if that helps as I got the graphics problems in both Mint and Xubuntu which are buntu 9 based, yet Ubuntu 10 didnt have this problem. Will running the updater update system drivers too? Simon PS. Where is the System Profiler in Xubuntu? --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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pl2303 Serial to USB problem - /dev/ttyUSB0 not created
by Barry Samuels 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

I have a CurrentCost electricity usage monitor which is normally connected to my desktop via USB. When the unit is plugged in I get a number of lines in syslog like so: kernel: usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12 kernel: pl2303 4-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected kernel: usb 4-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0 I am trying to get this same device working on my laptop but this time I see the following in syslog: kernel: pl2303: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver but nothing else i.e no 'attached to ttyUSB0'. Looking in /dev there is no ttyUSBn Whereas the desktop also loads the pl2303 and usbserial kernel modules automatically when the device is connected the laptop does not and when I load them manually I get only the above mentioned line in syslog. Needless to say the software which monitors the device won't connect. Any suggestions? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Re: [ALUG] Installing Linux Without CD/USB
by mark fernandes (IFR) 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Thinkpad 240 and 240X have PCMCIA network cards so PXE unlikely. And as said by Simon earlier - no USB or CD boot (Windows install by special boot floppy that mounts IBM PCMCIA CD drive and gets the party started). Putting drive in another PC is usually the way to go but for a mixed OS environment I suspect Wubi and it's ilk is the most likely to succeed. Thinkpad wiki http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installation_instructions_for_the_ThinkPad_240 Regards, Mark (Who used to own and use a TP240) >From: Ricky Bruce <rickybruce(a)gmail.com> > >On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Simon Royal <simonroyal(a)live.co.uk> wrote: >> My next trick is to get Linux installed and this is where you guys come in. I would like to install Linux Mint LXDE or >>possibly Xubuntu. How can I do it without a CD drive, without being able to boot via USB and without messing up my >>Windows installation? >> > >I have never tried it, but would a network based install work? PXE >seems to ring a bell > >Ricky > >*************************

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Installing Linux Without CD/USB
by Simon Royal 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Hi Well, I got my ThinkPad 240X and after a bit of a struggle got the drives partitioned and XP Home installed, all without a CD drive or floppy drive for this machine and it doesnt boot from USB. Long story, but it involved taking the drive out and copying install files across via another laptop. In terms of speed compared to the ThinkPad 600, 600E and Umax I had, this is very quick. XP rips along, but it has no Linux installed at present. My next trick is to get Linux installed and this is where you guys come in. I would like to install Linux Mint LXDE or possibly Xubuntu. How can I do it without a CD drive, without being able to boot via USB and without messing up my Windows installation? I have partitioned the drive. I have XP installed on one, a small one containing the XP installer files which could easily be replaced with the Linux install files, plus a spare partition ready for Linux. So any advice on how to do it. I have googled it and there are plenty of different ways although a lot of them assume you can boot via USB. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Re: [ALUG] Installing Linux Without CD/USB
by Simon Royal 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Marcus I looked at Wubi earlier. I got the impression it would install Ubuntu just like any other Windows app a bit like virtualisation rather than a seperate bootable linux on a seperate partition. I will give it another look. Simon ---------------------------------------- > Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 13:57:21 +0100 > Subject: Re: [ALUG] Installing Linux Without CD/USB > From: runlevelten(a)gmail.com > To: simonroyal(a)live.co.uk > > Hi Simon, > > Try Wubi. http://wubi-installer.org/ > > I recently used this in similar circumstances and it went fine. - You > can download the iso to the machine and use that without burning it to > a CD, then run the installer from your windows desktop. > > Another thing you can do is a manual frugal install of puppy by > copying some files into a directory on the windows root - which isn't > perfect but results in a distro that may be appropriate for your > hardware, and really quite snappy. Instructions on their website > (somewhere I don't have bookmarked) - a search for "manual frugal > install" should do it. > > Good luck!

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Re: [ALUG] Installing Linux Without CD/USB
by Marcus Harris 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Hello Simon, Try Wubi. http://wubi-installer.org/ I recently used this in similar circumstances and it went fine. - You can download the iso to the machine and use that without burning it to a CD, then run the installer from a "windows" desktop. Another thing you can do is a manual frugal install of puppy by copying some files and creating a directory on the "windows" root - which isn't perfect but results in a distro that may be appropriate for your hardware, and really quite snappy. Instructions on their website (somewhere I don't have bookmarked) - a search for "manual frugal install" should do it. Good luck!

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Copying SD cards
by Chris Walker 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

Apologies if this appears twice - I posted it to the wrong address, having already posted it using the wrong email address! I've copied one 2GB SD card to another 2GB card using the dd command (having copied it to the hard drive as an intermediate step). The original card will load up in the desired device - a TomTom sat nav but the second card won't. Is there any way for me to check that the cards are the same? Also, and I realise that it's a bit OT here (although the TomTom is a linux device!) but does anybody have any ideas what might be wrong with the card? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Awaiting My 240X
by Simon Royal 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

Hi Thank you all for your advice and I did take it on board. However, I needed a laptop now and it did only cost me £15. I am awaiting the arrival of a ThinkPad 240X. It is a P3 500mhz model, so not too bad spec and better than my previous ThinkPad and the Umax. It will suffice for now. I dont need to shell out any money on it, I have any additional upgrades I need for it in my spares box. I will begin saving for a newer machine, probably a netbook of some sort. At present I only have my phone for web and emailing so I needed a laptop quick. I have a hard drive pre loaded with XP and Linux Mint LXDE so I will be up and running pretty much straight away. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Compaq CQ5306uk - good bet for Ubuntu?
by Mark Rogers 03 Aug '10

03 Aug '10

I need a new PC for work use. I'm looking at: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/186618 which is: - Core-2 Quad Q8300 - 4GB RAM - Intel GMA X4500 graphics, onboard sound (not sure what chipset, presumably something from Intel) Anyone have any good reasons why this would be a bad bet for Ubuntu? Should I go 32-bit or 64-bit install? Usage is day-to-day stuff (web browsing, email, etc) but also running virtual machines would be good (using VirtualBox). Seems like a good price for the spec (<£350+VAT) but no point if I'm going to have to problems with it. Any good partitioning suggestions for its 1TB drive? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Gnome Panel Problem!
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 02 Aug '10

02 Aug '10

Hi Folks (apos for X-posting!) I've hit a problem with the gnome panel. The top panel on the desktop is the Menu Bar. This is OK. The bottom one is where the problem is. Normally, this shows the "workspace switcher" with a little box for each workspace; switch by mouse click or Ctrl-Alt-Arrow. No problem with that bit. It also used to show, for each window that is open in the current workspace, a rectangle with part of the window title in it. If you click on one of these, the corresponding window is minimised; click again, and the window reappears. I don't know what this feature is called. Every time you open a new window, a corresponding rectangle appears; when you close the window, the rectangle dispperas. Suddenly, without warning, this latter feature has disappeared! I have tried right-click + "add to panel" but cannot find anything that corresponds to it. I want to restore this feature. Can enyone tell me where to look? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Aug-10 Time: 20:41:59 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Used PC hardware for sale (running Debian)
by mick 31 Jul '10

31 Jul '10

I have recently replaced/upgraded some of my kit and I now have two older machines surplus to requirements. Before I advertise on e-bay (or cheapcycle) I thought I would offer then to ALUG members. The machines are both full tower systems and have new clean installs of Debian 5 desktop. (Before OS installation both machines were DBAN'd so I'm reasonably comfortable that I am not leaking any private information.) Specs are: Machine 1 ECS P4M800 PRO motherboard Pentium 4 650 (3.4GHz dual core) 2 Gig DDR2 RAM 1 DVD writer (with integral additional 2 USB ports and multicard reader) 2 * SATA Disks (1 at 200 Gig, 1 at 320 Gig) ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics card 1 additional PCI 10/100 ethernt card Machine 2 MSI 7253 Motherboard AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2 Gig DDR2 RAM 2 * DVD writer 2 * IDE disks (1 at 150 Gig, 1 at 250 Gig) Nvidia Geforce 7300 graphics card 1 additional 802.11 PCI wifi card Neither machine is blindingly fast by current standards, but either would make reasonable second use desktop machines or file/print/web servers. I am asking £75.00 for machine 1 and £65.00 for machine 2. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300
by Wayne Stallwood 31 Jul '10

31 Jul '10

On 31/07/10 15:39, Simon Royal wrote: > My ThinkPad and Umax both ran XP and Linux Mint LXDE at a reasonable pace even with their low specs and low RAM Heh, I think we might have different expectations when it comes to a machine running at a "reasonable pace". Personally I don't consider XP (with antivirus and being used for anything other than looking at the desktop) usable below 512MB and certainly wouldn't want to spend much time on anything with less than 1GB...on any Processor. Maybe I am just getting old and impatient :)

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ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300
by Simon Royal 31 Jul '10

31 Jul '10

Hi I am looking at two laptops, finishing today on eBay. The two models above. They are both similarly specced, both feature external optical drives, both max at the same amount of RAM. Does anyone have any experience with these and Linux? Ive used Linux on another older ThinkPad and it was pretty easy. Im not sure of the Compaq Armada M300. Any help? Any suggestions? Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Fwd: Re: ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300
by Simon Royal 31 Jul '10

31 Jul '10

Martin The 240X is higher specced than the 240. The one I am looking at is a P3 500. The size of it is what drew me to it. I do like ThinkPads. I loved the 600 I had, amazing and quite fast for its specs. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i). ________________ Reply Header ________________ Subject: Re: [ALUG] ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300 Author: Martin Collins <mobile.sea(a)gmail.com> Date: 31st July 2010 12:29 I had a thinkpad 240 a long time ago and therefore haven't used any recent distrubutions on it. I think it had a Celeron 300MHz processor. I was using it with SuSE Linux 7.3 and 8.0, possibly up to 8.1 before I sold it. From what I remember it wasn't very fast. The 240 is small and has a small screen so you might be better off buying a 2nd hand netbook as it would be a lot faster and will run such recent distrubutions as UNR, etc. Rgds, Martin On 31 July 2010 09:47, Simon Royal <simonroyal(a)live.co.uk> wrote: > Hi > > I am looking at two laptops, finishing today on eBay. The two models above. > > They are both similarly specced, both feature external optical drives, both max at the same amount of RAM. > > Does anyone have any experience with these and Linux? Ive used Linux on another older ThinkPad and it was pretty easy. > > Im not sure of the Compaq Armada M300. > > Any help? Any suggestions? > > Simon > > --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i). > > > _______________________________________________ > main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > http://www.alug.org.uk/ > http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main > Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! > _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Fwd: Re: ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300
by Simon Royal 31 Jul '10

31 Jul '10

Wayne I see your point. I havent lost any money so far on the bits I have bought on eBay. A P3 500 is quite an improvement over what I have. I know both have a fairly low RAM ceiling. My ThinkPad and Umax both ran XP and Linux Mint LXDE at a reasonable pace even with their low specs and low RAM, so these two machines while being old are still a considerable improvement and for around £20 plus the spares I have kicking around I can have a machine almost twice as fast as I have. My question was does anyone have experience with them. I like ThinkPads and they have a good reputation with Linux but not heard anything about Compaq machines. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i). ________________ Reply Header ________________ Subject: Re: [ALUG] ThinkPad 240X & Compaq Armada M300 Author: Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.co.uk> Date: 31st July 2010 11:45 In all honesty I think you are wasting your time and money. I didn't check out the Thinkpad but the Compaq maxes out at what 320MB ? Even if you go for a distro with a lightweight desktop environment you still probably want to run a modern browser etc, that laptop is still last century's technology and to be honest needs to go in the bin. Another problem with these machines is that nobody is testing the modern distros against them because they are so old they are off the radar now, so you have to expect issues with buggy ACPI etc as the foo that made that machine work might have fallen out of the kernel and nobody cared. At least with modern hardware there is a high chance that someone else has tried to run the same distro on the same machine and reported bugs etc. I mean I know you said you have very limited funds to work with..but what you have spent on that umax plus buying either of these and did you buy the original thinkpads ? You wouldn't be that far off from a 2nd hand Netbook or sommin else a bit more recent. I mean even if you are managing to stuff what doesn't work back on ebay and sell for what you paid you are still losing postage costs and sellers fees no ? I don't mean to sound overly negative here, but I just can't stand seeing someone with limited funds waste more money. I'd say try to save up £100 and see what that gets you...If you dump what you have so far back on ebay you might get halfway there. _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Re: [ALUG] Used PC hardware for sale (running Debian)
by Anthony Anson 29 Jul '10

29 Jul '10

mick wrote: > On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:38:44 +0100 > Anthony Anson <tony.anson(a)girolle.co.uk> allegedly wrote: > >> He got a new one - all singing, all dancing. >> >> It won't be long before he wants an upgrade... >> > > Apple fanbois seem to be particularly prone to this problem. Apple pie doesn't hang about either. Don't know if I ever asked here, but my old box of tricks (full tower AMD 900, caddy with 4 trays - Lenny, early BeOS, Win 98SE, Win 2000) suddenly refused to play with Win 2000, Worked perfectly AFAICT with Debian, BeOS and Win 98. Tried to reinstall Win 2000, but it wouldn't do so. Got about halfway through the process then stubbornly refused to play any more. Borrowed an XP disc, and that wouldn't load, same symptoms as the 2000 CD. Put an old NT HDD in the BeOS tray, and that wouldn't work, so tried an old Win 98, and that was OK, as was the 98SE. Tried to creep up on it by installing Win 95 and upgrading to 98, 98SE, Win 2000, but it got just so far, and spat 2000 out. DOS 6.22 works, as does any flavour of Penguin AFAICT - but it won't have anything to do with NT-based stuff. Now, I'd like it to work with XP or 2000, but I have misgivings about trying to run Virtual Box under Debian to host 2000, which I would guess, will fall over. The motherboard looks OK - no corrosion or leaky electrolytics AFAICS, and I haven't guddled about in the BIOS for ages before it had its spat - and that only to change the boot order. Anyone any thoughts? (Apart from buying Machine No 1...) -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Resolve Install Problems
by Simon Royal 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Hi Im still trying to sort out these problems getting Linux installed on this old Umax laptop. Ive tried booting Limux Mint 9 LXDE and it ran the live CD once and part installed. Since then no success in getting back to the Live desktop. It just sits on the boot screen doing nothing. The same thing happens with Lubuntu. I did successfully boot the Ubuntu alterntaive installer and it started installing no problems, but I cancelled it as Ubunut is a bit too heavy for this hardware. I dont think it is a hardware fault as it runs XP no problems. Also I did have Linux Mint 9 LXDE installed on another hard drive and it booted to it and ran, also it has booted to the live CD once and all hardware including sound works. So any ideas? Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Libretto 50 and 110 & Linux
by Simon Royal 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Hi A mate of mine has a Libretto 50 and a Libretto 110. I have always had a fondness for these pint size puters. The 50 is a 75Mhz Pentium and the 110 is a 166Mhz Pentium. I know which versions of Windows will run on them and how to do it without a CD drive, but what about Linux. I use a lot of older hardware (as you might have guessed), but even this is stretching it for me. I was thinking Puppy Linux or DSL might be good for these beasts. The 50 has 16MB RAM maxxing at 32MB RAM. The 110 has 32MB maxxing at 64MB RAM. Neither has floppy or CD drives. I think the easiest thing would be to pull the drive - I have a 4GB spare sitting here - and either install it via another machine or put the install files on a partition on the hard drive. Any help. I might be able to get these beauties from him. He is moving and doesnt want to take the clutter with him. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Umax ActionBook 347T running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Re: [ALUG] Umax Laptop & Linux Mint LXDE Problems
by Simon Royal 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Marcus I left it for over half an hour and it still just sat on the boot screen, occasionally accessing the disc. I am now burning a new copy on different media. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Umax Laptop & Linux Mint LXDE Problems
by Simon Royal 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Hi I picked up my Umax laptop. It has been a traumatic 24 hours. Hard drive was tiny so that needed replacing. It had very little RAM so that needed upgrading. Then the CD drive was on its last legs so I had to swap that out. Then it turns out it only displays at 800x600 despite being told it would display at 1024x768. I had trouble installing Windows XP but that was down to the CD drive being old and my disc being scratched. The combo drive I had worked fine. This morning I am trying to install Linux Mint 9 LXDE and I am not having much luck. The machine boots to CD every time no problems. Then most of the time it will sit on the 5 coloured dots screen for ages. Some times it will then go to a black screen with a mouse pointer. I did get to the live desktop this morning and started the installer, but it hung on the partition creating section and I havent been able to get back to that process again. It is infuriating, I had no problems installing it on my 600E. The combo drive spins up and down all the time. You can hear it accessing the disc sometimes, but then it will spin down and do nothing for ages, just the 5 coloured dots changing colour. This is so annoying, any ideas. Is this laptop broken, am I doing something wrong. Spec is: AMD K62 475Mhz, 256MB RAM, 15GB hard drive, combo drive. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- Umax ActionBook 347T running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Re: [ALUG] Umax Laptop & Linux Mint LXDE Problems
by mark fernandes (IFR) 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Simon, This site is often useful for linux on archaic laptop hardware However I only found two Umax entries (neither the same as your beast) and people were using Mandrake... The Mint install experience sounds similar to mine (on a saintsong espresso pc) where I got a blank display and then on/off access of CD. That put me off Mint :-( There might be some hardware that installer doesn't know what to do with e.g. when creating X settings. AFAIR my beastie did install with other distros e.g.Fedora. If you can get another live distro (e.g. knoppix) to boot the umax then maybe you can scope out some hardware clues? However, this might be a long trek.... http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/umax.html Hope that this helps, Mark

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Re: [ALUG] Umax Laptop & Linux Mint LXDE Problems
by Simon Royal 28 Jul '10

28 Jul '10

Chris I got round the CD drive problem buy putting in a spare combo drive I had laying around. I dont want to give up. At present I am trying Ubuntu alt installer to see how that goes. I need a laptop as I dont have any space for a desktop. 3 kids and another on the way means very little space or money to myself. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum. (Sent using Sony Ericsson P990i).

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Wow!!!
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 25 Jul '10

25 Jul '10

Good morning, Folks! An "Advertorial Feature" (yes, that's what they call it) just seen on the Mail On Sunday's website: Internet Explorer 8 Download the new Internet Explorer 8 customised for the MailOnLine Wow! That's everything we ever wanted! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 25-Jul-10 Time: 10:36:55 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Linux On Umax Laptop
by Simon Royal 23 Jul '10

23 Jul '10

Hi Does anyone have any experience of using Linux on a Umax laptop. I am awaiting the arrival of a Umax ActionBook 347T of which I will run Linux Mint 9 LXDE and Windows XP. I can find very little information about them in general nevermind with Linux. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600E running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now

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Freelance work - what price
by Ian Porter 23 Jul '10

23 Jul '10

Hi All, I have been doing some work for a old company, but because of the current climate I am going to start looking for freelance work. So the main question is since I am not a hardened freelance person, what sort of prices per hour / per day are the base / mid / high for such ? I am more than capable of developing in most languages and also systesms, if the job was web developer software developer service developer kernel developer etc what sort of prices has anyone on this list charged ? or been charged as such. -- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

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Freelance work - what price
by Ian Porter 23 Jul '10

23 Jul '10

Hi All, I have been doing some work for a old company, but because of the current climate I am going to start looking for freelance work. So the main question is since I am not a hardened freelance person, what sort of prices per hour / per day are the base / mid / high for such ? I am more than capable of developing in most languages and also systesms, if the job was web developer software developer service developer kernel developer etc what sort of prices has anyone on this list charged ? or been charged as such. -- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

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Echo New Line
by Richard Parsons 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

I'm trying out edbrowse. I've been looking for an easy to script browser with full javascript support for a long time, and it looks like it may be the ticket. I want to script it like this, but I don't know how to echo a new line: echo "e http://yahoo.com\n1,$n" | edbrowse How do I properly echo a new line? I'm sure that the answer will no doubt make me slap my own head... Thanks, Richard

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Bash Templating
by Richard Parsons 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

Hi, Can anyone recommend to me a commandline templating system? I want to be able to store information about clients and cases in simple text files and then merge that information into precedent documents. I'll then save and print those documents. My perfect script would be something like this: echo "name='Richard Parsons'\naddress='10 Green Hill etc'" > me.txt echo "name='Miles Davies'\naddress='14 Jazz Road etc'" > miles.txt echo "Hey $to.name of $to.address,\nGreat album!\nTake care,\n$from.name of $from.address" > precedent.txt magic-template-script -from me.txt --to miles.txt < precedent.txt > letter.txt I'm thinking of using Cheetah (http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/), but am not particularly attached to it. I want something that I can run straight from bash if possible, but if scripting is necessary I most prefer python. Any comments or thoughts? Thanks, Richard

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Sound in Ubuntu 10.04
by James Bensley 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

My motherboard has onboard sound (how original!), it's a Foxconn ELA (ICH10 I believe). It has a digital out but in Ubuntu 10.04 I can only get stereo out no surround out? The box used to be dual boot with Windows and under Windows I could get my much loved 5.1 kit a 5.1 feed out from the box but now it cries in stereo. I suspect this is because of this (http://i43.tinypic.com/nn5lq1.png) This is a screen shot of my sound preferences, as you can see only stereo over digital is an option, why is this? Can I change this? -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

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Re: [ALUG] 600E Track Point
by Simon Royal 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

Wayne Just looked at the track point and no its no detechable. It is attached via a flat cable that runs up the keyboard and is connected to the broken main keyboard connector. >From what I can see it would be very awkward to peel away. I think its time for a new top or a new laptop. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

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600E Track Point
by Simon Royal 21 Jul '10

21 Jul '10

Hi I am having a nightmare of a day with my 600/600E project. I bought a 600E which was fully working but missing hard drive, cd drive, power supply and ram. It arrived today and I took the above out of my 600 and booted the 600E. All good except the trackpoint does some weird things. I decided to replace the whole top panel with the one from my 600 as it is in mint condition (well was). In doing so the top connector for the speakers fell off. The one from the 600E also fell off. Not good. Oh well its only sound. Can hack around this later. Then there is another connector - a larger one at the top just under where it says 600/600E, well the end came off this too and try as I might I cannot get it back on. So I am stuck with a 600 top with working trackpoint but broken connector and a 600E top with faulty trackpoint but connector in tact. At present I am using the 600E top as it works. How can I disable the trackpoint or preferably fix it. I have plugged in a USB mouse but every so often the trackpoint goes mental and takes over the cursor. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600E running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now

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600 To 600E... Oops.
by Simon Royal 21 Jul '10

21 Jul '10

Hi My ThinkPad 600E arrived today. Two minutes after its arrival, the CD drive, hard drive, RAM and CMOS battery was taken out of my 600 and installed in the 600E and it was booting. A working machine except the mouse pointer was broken. Would only go up and down. Pressing it left or right sent it into a frenzy. I decided to take the top from my 600 and put it on the 600E, and in the process broke the cable that leads down to the built in speakers, the connector came off. No worries, I had the other cable from the other top... oops... nope that broke too. Seems they are rather flimsy. So I have a 600E 366Mhz P2 laptop which is slightly faster than my 600 300Mhz P2, but it now has no sound. Under XP it detected the audio card so I am assuming it it just the speakers out and nothing else. Might try a hack of attaching a 3.5 jack to the end of the speaker wires and run it out of the body and into the headphone socket to get audio working through the built in speakers. Will test the socket out later. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600E running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now

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Another Distro for Simon?
by mark fernandes (IFR) 21 Jul '10

21 Jul '10

See review of Pinguy OS - a Mint-y Ubuntu re-spin at http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/07/pinguy-os-distro-review.html I'm with Simon on LXDE - have just set my 6-year old son up with a Edubuntu 10.04LTS/LXDE-installed Compaq Ipaq desktop which seems to cope with most things despite P3&512Mb spec. Lost l33t points in that I wound up using ndiswrapper for Safecom USB wireless... He seems happy enough though with educational (and not-so educational) games. Regards, Mark Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

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Linux Mint LXDE Anyone?
by Simon Royal 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

Hi Im still trying out new distros for my aging ThinkPad. As you know I prefer buntu based distros and am currently using Lubuntu and am very impressed with it. Out of all the distros I have tried so far it is by far the fastest - except Puppy Linux but I didnt really like that. I tried Xubuntu with LXDE instead and it wasn't anywhere near as fast as Lubuntu. I quite like LXDE too. Lubuntu is a little rough around the edges and is still in Alpha stage. Ive been looking at Linux Mint LXDE. I tried the standard Linux Mint a few months ago - which is Gnome based - and it didnt run well on my hardware but an LXDE version might be different. Has anyone used Linux Mint LXDE? Do you know how it compares to Lubuntu in terms of memory usage? Is it any good? Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600 running Windows XP & Lubuntu 10.04 & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now

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Lubuntu/OpenBox Theme Problems
by Simon Royal 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

Hi Im in Lubuntu and was playing around with the theme/appearance settings under Preferences/OpenBox Configuration Manager. I can change the theme, so it changes the colour of menu bars etc... but it only does half a job. It shows you a menu which looks the same as the menu bar/colours but mine doesnt change. Also the main LXDE menu stays as it was before, same fonts and colours. Anyone know why? I tried rebooting but no change. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600 running Windows XP & Lubuntu 10.04 & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now

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Lubuntu/Open Box Theme
by Simon Royal 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

Hi Im in Lubuntu and was playing around with the theme/appearance settings under Preferences/OpenBox Configuration Manager. I can change the theme, so it changes the colour of menu bars etc... but it only does half a job. It shows you a menu which looks the same as the menu bar/colours but mine doesnt change. Also the main LXDE menu stays as it was before, same fonts and colours. Anyone know why? I tried rebooting but no change. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600 running Windows XP & Lubuntu 10.04 & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ We want to hear all your funny, exciting and crazy Hotmail stories. Tell us now

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Re: [ALUG] 256MB RAM Sticks
by mark fernandes (IFR) 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

>From Thinkpad wiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Unofficial_maximum_memory_specs) Note last two lines. Hope that this helps, Mark (Who used to have a Thinkpad 240 :)) ------------------------------------------------------------- ThinkPad 600 ? 288MB ? ? * 416MB = 256MB low density PC100 SODIMM + 128MB PC66 SODIMM + 32MB PC66 on-board. It matters which SODIMM you put in which slot. This was first reported working on the Thinkpad Mailing List, and it worked error-free for me. The 600E (2645-8A0) with Bios INET36WW accept two modules of 256MB. The ram modules have 8 chips on each side. That results in 544MB. (RAM Typ: Micron MT16LSDF3264HG-133E4 PC133 CL3 sync). Processor is an Intel PII 366 PE, installed platform is Windows XP Pro with SP3. ------------------------------------------------------------- Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

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Lubuntu vs Crunchbang
by Simon Royal 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

Hi Quick question, which would run better on my TP600, Lubuntu or Crunchbang. I've been running Lubuntu for a few weeks and loving it. LXDE is very nice and a good alternative to Xfce. I did run Crunchbang a few months ago and liked it even though its desktop is a bit minimal. I need to settle on a good buntu based lightweight distro. Ubuntu is too heavy, Xubuntu is too heavy, didnt like Mint or Fluxbuntu. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600 running Windows XP & Lubuntu 10.04 & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/

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Newbie Crunchbang Question
by Simon Royal 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

Hi. Newbie question. Im giving Crunchbang another look. I used it before and it is pretty fast on older hardware like my ThinkPad 600. Crunchbang 9 is based Ubuntu however 10 is going to moved to Debian. Will that affect the hardware base. I use Ubuntu and its derivatives because it supports my hardware like my wireless card out of the box. Will moving to Debian affect this. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

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SFD2010 in East of England, round 2
by MJ Ray 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

OK, I've lost the plot again. Sorry about that. Three questions: 1. is the meet happening? 2. SFD is about getting new people into free software. What can be done to encourage that? While LUGgers love kit meets, it may need a bit more than tech and beer to attract new people out to Syleham. 3. Registration has just opened! http://cgi.softwarefreedomday.org/register.html If you want the SFD materials, register in the next 10 days! Who'll do that? Thanks for any answers, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

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256MB RAM Sticks
by Simon Royal 19 Jul '10

19 Jul '10

Hi. Does anyone have any 256MB stick PC66/100 kicking around? I have a ThinkPad 600 at present and have just picked up a 600E which is missing drives and RAM. I am going to transplant all the bits from the 600 to the 600E. My 600 has 2x128MB sticks of RAM, the most it can take and some of the reason for switching to the 600E as the 600E can take 2x256MB sticks. Does anyone have any spare 256MB sticks of PC66/100 so I can max out this beauty? Simon -- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

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OpenOffice Writer errors out when saving ODT files with error saving styles.xml
by Srdjan Todorovic 19 Jul '10

19 Jul '10

Hi All, Got this nasty problem where OpenOffice 3.1.1 has stopped being able to save .odt files. Earlier this morning, things were saving fine, but now I get: Error saving the document $document_title: error in writing sub-document styles.xml I have googled for a bit and some other people have had similar problems, where it seems that some files are corrupted. I have tried this: 1) opened ODT file -> save to another dir = fail with same message 2) Opened ODT file -> save as .doc = success 3) open the saved .doc file -> save as .odt = fail with same message 4) close all openoffice instances, fire up soffice from command line, new Writer document, type a few words -> save as .odt = fail with same message 5) Open the ODT file I had originally created and saved earlier -> error message "Error reading file" 6) moved ~/.ooo3/ to a different location, start openoffice and save new file = error as before about styles.xml 7) find /usr -iname styles.xml returns nothing 8) Inspected the styles.xml file in the odt file and seems ok, but is too long for me to inspect properly. What to do now? Seems the original file is now borked, and no one in #Openoffice.org has been helpful. Can anyone please suggest something I can do? Or should I start using the Word format? Thanks, Srdjan

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JIRA on Ubuntu Server
by Paul Grenyer 18 Jul '10

18 Jul '10

Hi All Is anyone else running JIRA on ubuntu? I've followed the instructions here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Setting+up+JIRA+Standalone+and… but when I reboot the server (to check that JIRA starts with the server) mysql is prevented form starting. Any ideas? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer

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Re: [ALUG] Open source client for Exchange web interface
by Phil Ashby 17 Jul '10

17 Jul '10

On 13/07/10 16:53, Dan <vi5u0-alug(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jul 2010, Wayne Stallwood wrote: > > > But is there a reason you can't ask the admin to set up a server > > side rule or just simply redirect your mail to another address ? > > The sysadmins volunteered the answer to this without being asked. The > answer was that they won't countenance the use of the Exchange > equivalent of a .forward file under any circumstances whatever. And a > somewhat pointed offer of the opportunity to attend a training course > in the use of OWA. > > Thanks to all who replied. One or two of the leads sound promising. Dan, We have a very similar issue here in BT, the Exchange systems have forwarding disabled, so in order to read my email from a Debian desktop, I have used (in chronological order): Evolution: ok-ish with Exchange 2003 OWA using Ximian connector Outlook 2003 in a Qemu VM against Exchange 2007 (I was 'upgraded') Thunderbird or Evolution or any IMAP/CalDAV/LDAP client via DavMail to the Exchange 2007 OWA - works very nicely, is 100% FOSS and written in Java so runs anywhere (currently on my local mail server). I was so impressed I gave the guy a donation! http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ - it rocks :) P

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SSH Clients
by Paul Grenyer 17 Jul '10

17 Jul '10

Hi all Can anyone recommend an SSH tool? I've been using putty, but one of the limitations of the Linux version appears to be that you cannot past into it. -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer

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Re: [ALUG] Kit Meet - Was SFD2010 in East of England
by Anthony Anson 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

Adam Bower wrote: > On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 07:32:45PM +0100, Anthony Anson wrote: >> First I've heard about a kit meet. > > Not sure if you meant that to go to the list, but see my email from this > thread on July 13th immediately in reply to MJR. Talks about a kit meet > :) Er, no. Doneitagain innit... I thought I'd trained myself not to just hit 'reply' I think I must have parked that thread in a local folder - sometimes I drag whole threads in my ALUG folder if the original subject is not in my immediate field of interest. I am interested in a kit meet, though like St Augustine, " ...but not yet." -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Re: [ALUG] Open source client for Exchange web interface
by Phil Ashby 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

On 16/07/10 12:00, Dan <vi5u0-alug(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > Are all components of this open source? I downloaded what's supposed > to be the source tarball and it contains (among other stuff) a bunch > of .class files - but I thought .class files were pre-compiled JVM > bytecode. Yes? No? They are - I guess you downloaded the pre-compiled installable version, try this source tarball from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/davmail/files then get: davmail-src-3.6.6-1032.tgz This includes a pile of Apache libraries (eg: commons-httpclient), but no closed source that I can spot. Phil.

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Desktop Icons
by Peter Hunter 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

Hi everyone, I'm new to this list, and I haven't used Linux for many years, so I need some help please. I have 'clean' installed Ubuntu 10.04 and am using Firefox 3.6.6 I like to keep links to my regular websites on the desktop, so I drag the URL to it. Trouble is, every icon is the FF gold star. How do I get FF to use the websites own icon, so that I can easily recognise which one I want to click on? Always assuming I can do so of course. Also, is there a way of adjusting the size of the icon? These ones are so large they look ugly. My screen resolution is 1600 x 900 on an Acer 20" monitor. I'm not a novice, so you can be as technical as you like. Cheers in advance. Peter

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 15 Jul '10

15 Jul '10

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back, Monday 18th July, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. I can't make this one, as I'm away on a training course all week but hopefully they'll be enough regulars to welcome any newcomers. Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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SFD2010 in East of England
by MJ Ray 15 Jul '10

15 Jul '10

Hi - Software Freedom Day (SFD, http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/) is Saturday 18 September 2010 and an excellent annual opportunity to promote Free Software. SFD is not widely known about in the UK, even among LUGs. At the moment, there's no SFD event listed near East Anglia. Would some ALUGgers like to start a SFD event so that people in the East of England have one? Given my current location, I'm trying to help the South West one. Maybe we could run a link between the two events, as well as any international links people can rustle up. Hope to hear back from someone, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

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Re: [ALUG] Open source client for Exchange web interface
by Phil Ashby 14 Jul '10

14 Jul '10

On 14/07/10 12:00, Chris G <cl(a)isbd.net> wrote: > There's a little tool I used when I was at BT that does a sort of > 'fetchmail' on Outlook. It was written in Java. I'm desperately > trying to think of its name - but can't at the moment. If I do > remember I will add it here. That was probably the one I wrote called MailFwd, however that was somewhat against the ethos of not forwarding messages off the Exchange platform :) P.

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DSL Wireless
by Simon Royal 14 Jul '10

14 Jul '10

Hi I am enjoying Lubuntu but love checking out different distros. I have been playing with DSL - DamnSmallLinux - today and checking out their wiki it says a RaLink PCMCIA should work out of the box. I have an Edimax card, which is RaLink based but nothing shows up. Anyone have any experience with it as it is a blazingly fast and if I could get wireless working I might use it. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 600 running Lubuntu 10.04 & Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4. _________________________________________________________________ http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/197222280/direct/01/ Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now

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Regex Help
by Richard Parsons 14 Jul '10

14 Jul '10

Friends, I admit that I am terrible with regex. I need a script to output all words beginning with "$" from a text file. Here's what I've got so far: cat file.txt | grep "$" | sed <some-regex> I don't want the whole line, just the word. Anyone help? :) Thanks, Richard

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Newbie Meeting & Repo Question
by Steve 13 Jul '10

13 Jul '10

Hi I've been dabbling with Linux for just over a year and am now consistently using Linux Mint albeit secondary to Windows. Do you ever run a newbies meeting, I still consider myself as that? Also, how is it possible to know (other than the approved Mint/Ubuntu repositories) which repositories/software is going to be ok, I feel like I may be missing out on stuff and in any case even in the approved repos they have disclaimers. Isn't Linux basically Linux won't most stuff play nicely together ? Steve

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Open source client for Exchange web interface
by Dan 13 Jul '10

13 Jul '10

Dear All, Much to my chagrin, I find myself obliged to receive mail on an Exchange server that presents to the world only its Outlook-like web interface. That's right, no POP3, no IMAP, just the web interface. It won't surprise you to learn that all I want to do with this setup is log in, find what new messages are in the inbox, and forward them to a friendlier mail server. Doing this manually with a web browser, however, is a hassle, because the web interface has no facility for forwarding multiple selected messages simultaneously, so I have to open up each message individually, and forward them one at a time. (Aside: I suspect this is a configuration option that's been chosen by the local sysadmins of the Exchange server. If so, they must _really_ dislike me.) So to my (surprisingly on-topic) question: is there an open-source client-side tool that can automate all this drudgery, please? -- Thanks, Dan

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OpenOffice Writer heading style hell
by Srdjan Todorovic 13 Jul '10

13 Jul '10

Hi all, Another OpenOffice 3.1.1 issue: You have a document that is being written, and you use Heading 1 and Heading 2 etc. You write the document and want to add another Heading 2, and suddenly the Heading 2 text is now a different font-family (Arial -> Times New Roman) or has different / unexpected font properties (obtains bold or italic properties). As in, two Heading 2 titles are now different in appearance on the same page! What's up with that? I thought this was supposed to be better than MS Office? I'm going to search the OpenOffice bug tracking system when I get some spare time, but wondered if anyone had an already hashed solution for this. Thanks in advance, Srdjan

1 0

Quickest way to clone drives
by Mark Rogers 12 Jul '10

12 Jul '10

I have some old servers to migrate to new hard disks (all running Windows Server). They have two SATA drives installed (and no spare capacity). I plan on connecting two new drives on USB/SATA adapters, and booting to a Linux Live CD to copy the data. The drives are 80GB drives, about 50% utilised, NTFS partitions. Which is the quickest software method to duplicate the disks? I'm looking for the shorted downtime I can get away with. I can look at commercial offerings if necessary (although they all want extra for copying server disks and I don't really need a pretty GUI). Obviously I'm looking for something which copies the structure and the data without copying all the blank space, so I assume that means it needs to understand NTFS. (It also needs to make the new disks bootable etc if the one being cloned was.) Will it be significantly quicker to take one drive out and clone from one SATA port to another, then swap the drives around to clone the other disk? Bear in mind I would then be doing the two disks serially (and there'd be a few extra minutes of shutting the server down and swapping disks around as well). I could possibly clone one of hard disks using my laptop but that would be USB-USB and I can't see that being anything other than slow. I know that I could do this all with dd but (I assume) it'll be relatively slow due to all the blank disk space being copied. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] Quickest way to clone drives
by James Bensley 12 Jul '10

12 Jul '10

Hi Mark, I have done this with the CloneZilla live CD, it understands many file systems such as NTFS, FAT32, ext2, ext3, HFS etc...This meant I could boot the CD with an external USB drive plugged into a server and image off the NTFS partitions from the server's drives, did some tinkering with the server, decided this wasn't what I had hoped for and so copied back over the images of the partitions... CloneZilla can copy at different levels, at the drive, volume or partition level and as requested, can only copy used space. HTH. -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

1 0

OpenOffice Writer jumps back a few pages when scrolling past pictures or tables
by Srdjan Todorovic 12 Jul '10

12 Jul '10

Hi all, I have an Openoffice writer document open, and it has a few inserted pictures (though also had this happen when tables are used). If I scroll using the wheel mouse, this appear fine, until the picture or table is visible, and then, if I'm not ultra-fast in my scrolling, the document viewer jumps back a few pages to where I was originally before I started to scroll. Has anyone else experienced this problem? It is very annoying, and any method to solve this would be relevant to my interests. OpenOffice 3.1.1, OOO310m21 (Build: 9319) Thanks, Srdjan

1 0

Ubuntu Alternative Fails
by Simon Royal 09 Jul '10

09 Jul '10

Hi. I decided to give Ubuntu a whirl on my ThinkPad, that was running Xubuntu. I used the Alternative installer disc as it is quicker and my ThinkPad only has 296MB RAM. However, every version of Ubuntu I have tried fails while installing. I tried 9.04 and now I am trying 10.04. The original CD drive was flakey and nothing would install from it, no versions of Windows or Linux so I put in a new one and XP and Xubuntu 9.10 installed no problem, but Ubuntu still fails. It fails on the 'select and install software' section. It is a brand new burnt CD, burnt at 4x speed. Any ideas. I am now without a Linux installation and dont really want to go back to Xubuntu just yet. Failing that I might try and install Linux Mint. Regards. Simon http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

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Re: [ALUG] £400 - what's the best buy?
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

The i3 looks a better buy than the AMD from Novatech, looking at the barebones. I bought the ebuyer zoostorm Intel 6300 for someone, it was cheap and fast and Debian went in with no problem. A bit noisy. Very good value though. For someone else, what is wanted is a quiet and not huge desktop, aesthetically reasonable. We are probably going to get the steel Silverstone matx case from Scan, the one that is called something like Evolution and sells for about 45.00. Then we will get a couple of quiet fans from QuietPC, and a Nexus 430 psu, and do all this with the matx i3 mainboard bundle from Novatech which has onboard graphics including vga and dvi. I am expecting this to be very quiet. Not sure whether to use the stock Intel cooler which Novatech supplies, or to go with a Scythe lower profile cooler in the interests of getting the noise from that down. Probably the Scythe. This will come in at not much over 400. The compact Novatech i3 is a contender here too, except noise would probably be higher, and cooling less good, than with the silverstone case. I do think Intel has it over AMD at the moment. Its a great pity that we lost Komplett. You could specify exactly what you wanted, starting with their stock models, and a couple weeks later, it arrived all connected and tested. I got someone a Core 2 system with silent graphics card just before they stopped selling. It used a Gigabyte Triton case, and you have to look to see if its running. Peter

1 0

ALUG horse logo
by MJ Ray 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

The horse and penguin didn't perish in the wiki fire! Anyone want it? If so, I may have the xcf for GIMP somewhere too. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/comp/alugtalk/alughorse.i.png If anyone wants to draw a better one, that would also be good. If someone can go make an armoured tux sit on the real thing and take pictures... ;-) Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

2 1

£400 - what's the best buy?
by James Freer 08 Jul '10

08 Jul '10

I want to get a new PC - what would be the best buy? I wondered about this one http://www.ebuyer.com/product/193626 Perhaps some of you build PCs in which case can you do better buy than this? Obviously to run linux [inc compiz which i haven't been able to do on current PC]. I had thought about a laptop but i thought they ran a bit slower than a desktop for a comparable spec. thanks james

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Re: [ALUG] [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: Open Source Motion
by MJ Ray 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

ALUG members may like to see the Norwich City Council Open Source Motion which is being discussed at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.fsf.uk/5909 For further national news, see http://floss.pro/fsfeuk Does anyone think other Anglian councils might follow suit, maybe even note the strategic benefits, call it Free and Open Source Software and consider exit costs too? Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

2 1

Changing broadband provider
by Bev Nicolson 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Or more particularly, getting it to work once I have. I'm after some reassurance essentially as I'm moving from Virgin Media to a non BT ISP and this is new territory. With VM, I needed to be taken through registration via their IP address (yes, some support for Linux!) but will I need to go through something like that again when I swop the way I get broadband? Ta. Bev.

4 5

Re: [ALUG] Anyone use a USB Mobile Broadband dongle?
by Chris G 05 Jul '10

05 Jul '10

Just to report that both dongles are now working with very little effort at all. I just installed usb-modeswitch and both dongles worked without any hassle at all. The Virgin Mobile Alcatel one just plugged in, was trivial to set up and worked. The Belgian one was a *little* more involved but not bad:- I bought an unlocked Hauwei (3) dongle one Ebay for £19.99 I got a Mobistar pay-as-you-go SIM in Belgium for 15 euros Plugged said SIM into the dongle and it connceted but would only access the Mobistar site saying it had run out of credit. I then realised I had to 'enable' it by putting it in my mobile phone and texting 'start' to specified address. ... and now the Mobistar dongle is working too, hence this message. It was all rather less painful than I feared. -- Chris Green

1 0

USB Floppy drive problems
by Chris Walker 02 Jul '10

02 Jul '10

Can somebody point out my error please? I have a usb floppy drive attached to my machine. If I insert a DOS floppy, the light comes on and Dolphin pops up to tell me the disc label. But I want to read some adfs formatted floppies and the thing isn't playing ball. If I run cat /proc/partitions with the DOS floppy in, it tells me it's sdc but if try it with an adfs floppy the light comes on and goes off. If I then type mount -t adfs /dev/sdc /media/floppy it tells me that there is no medium found on /dev/sdc so what am I doing wrong? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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cron not running script
by Jenny Hopkins 30 Jun '10

30 Jun '10

Hi folks, I've set up a script** to run from cron as below. This script runs from a terminal as it should, but won't run either from cron.d or from cron.hourly when stuffed in there. Can anyone see anything glaringly obviously wrong with it? It's run as /etc/cron.d/update-ip, with the following line: */5 * * * * root /bin/checkIP.sh **I'm sure it's a crappy script, but as long as it does the job..... ;-) Puzzled, Jenny #!/bin/sh #checks IP of courthouse every 5 mins and updates file on stoneboat /etc/ddns/courthouse-ip set -e currentIP=$(/usr/bin/wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org | sed -e 's/[^[:digit:]|.]//g') remote="stoneboat:/etc/ddns/" local="/tmp/courthouse-ip" echo $currentIP > $local >> /home/jenny/checkip.txt 2>&1 ##the last bit was put in to troubleshoot scp $local $remote exit 0

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Sound - is it just me or is it really such a black art?
by Chris G 29 Jun '10

29 Jun '10

I never seem to be able to get sound apps working quickly/easily in Linux (or WIndows for that matter). Is it really such a black art. For example I'm trying to get twinkle (VOIP softphone) to work in Ubuntu 10.04. Installs OK, configures OK with my VOIP provider, works perfectly as far as making the call is concerned. I can dial a number, the number rings and I get all the confirmations when the far end picks up the phone and hangs up. .... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out. Sound does appear to work as my Virtualbox Windows XP guest plays Windows sounds fine. However I can't find *any* Linux application which will play a test sound for me. Twinkle offers me a whole raft of different sound 'devices':- ALSA: default device ALSA: plughw:0,0: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Analog) ALSA: plughw:0,1: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Digital) ALSA: Other device OSS: /dev/dsp: Realtek ALC1200 (HDA-Intel) OSS: other device So which do I choose (I think I've tried most of them!)? -- Chris Green

5 4

Is there anything like a 'non-blog' Wordpress?
by Chris G 29 Jun '10

29 Jun '10

I've been around this loop before and not really got anywhere but still there's no harm in asking. Is there anything as simple and straightforward as Wordpress for creating web sites that *isn't* a blogging platform? There are many much more heavyweight CMS/Portal systems such as Drupal and Joomla but there really doesn't seem to be a site creation application as simple to use as Wordpress. I *can* use Wordpress to create a site which isn't fundamentally a blog by turning off loads of options and using its static 'pages' but it somehow seems silly to turn off so much of what it's intended to do. I already have ways to create utilitarian web pages from restructured text and that's fine for 'own use' internal web pages but I'm looking for something just a bit more sophisticated between that and a full-blown CMS. -- Chris Green

5 13

What would give me a high load average when tops reports nothing much?
by Chris G 28 Jun '10

28 Jun '10

I have an odd situation here, after a recent reboot my system seemed *very* slow indeed, took ages to start the X desktop etc. and when I looked at the load average with 'uptime' it was over 5 which is pretty silly considering there is really nothing much happening. While the X desktop was still thinking about appearing I ran a virtual console, logged in (even that was a bit slow) and ran tops. Tops reported virtually nothing consuming processor time. So what's going on, why is my system slow, especially when starting, but nothing actually seems to be doing much. This is a Core 2 Duo Quad core processor with 8Gb of memory so really should be quite quick - especially when doing nothing! Running uptime now (40 minutes after power-up) the load average is 0.03 which is more like what I'd expect to see? Is there any way to see what that load average is indicating? -- Chris Green

6 12

Anyone use a USB Mobile Broadband dongle?
by Chris G 26 Jun '10

26 Jun '10

I've just ordered mobile broadband from Virgin for my wife to use with her laptop (Ubuntu 10.04) when on the move. It comes with an Alcatel X220 USB dongle. Does anyone here use one (same or similar), if so a couple of questions:- What are the chances of it working 'out of the box'? The Alcatel X220 says it has Linux support. If not then any ideas where to go to find useful information? (I've done some Googling and have some ideas but more is always useful) I'm assuming there's a SIM in the dongle because we want to use it in Belgium as well and I'm hoping all I need to do is buy a mobile broadband SIM there and stick it in the dongle. Am I right? Is there some initialisation/configuring needed to activate the SIM? -- Chris Green

7 11

Lubuntu
by Simon Royal 26 Jun '10

26 Jun '10

Hi I just wanted to say thanks for the Lubuntu suggestion. Its fast. Installed it last night only took a couple of hours via normal installer vs Ubuntu and Xubuntu which took about 4 hours via the alternative installer as the normal installer wouldnt run. Lubuntu is fast, even on my P2 300mhz with 296MB RAM. Chromium browser opens within two or three seconds and rips from page to page at an amazing speed. Plus it has all the benefits of a Ubuntu base like all my hardware being detected straight away including wireless card. So far so good. A new install means setting up sound again but so far so wow! Very impressed. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

1 0

VOIP from the computer - possible? how?
by Chris G 25 Jun '10

25 Jun '10

We have VOIP phones on our home network working completely independently of the computers, the base station just plugs into a switch or router and off it goes. Now, however, I'm thinking it would be useful to be able to use VOIP from a netbook or laptop while travelling around. So, is there a straightforward way to connect a headset to a Linux computer and use it as a VOIP phone? How does one dial a number if so, presumably some sort of on screen interface. Lookin in synaptic (the GUI package manager for Ubuntu) there seem to be a few possibilities - kphone, twinkle, etc. - any recommendations for what works well etc. ? -- Chris Green

2 1

Best OS For TP600
by Simon Royal 25 Jun '10

25 Jun '10

Hi. I have a ThinkPad 600 compliments of a generous group member. Its a 300mhz maxxed with 296MB of RAM. Its no speed demon, but it does ok. Its currently running Ubuntu 10.04 and XP, probably not the best choice for great performance. So what would be good? Is Windows 2000 still viable as a good version of Windows. I only use it for surfing, emailing via webmail and listening to music. Nothing heavy. The apps I use in Windows are Firefox, iTunes, Office 2000. I use Ubuntu most of the time and only use it as it is one of the less nerdy linux distros as my linux skills are not great. Id like a newer machine, but funds are not permitting at present, so I need to get the most out of this one. Is there much performance difference between 2000 and XP? I know I have asked this before. Ubuntu and XP are ok, but are quite sluggish at times and it is frustrating. Simon --- http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - http://www.tinyurl.com/macspectrum (sent using Sony Ericsson P990i)

8 12

Apache SSL
by Mark Rogers 24 Jun '10

24 Jun '10

I have a site with a cheapie SSL certificate from 123-Reg. It has been working for the past couple of years but they've just sent me a new certificate which is crashing Apache when I try to install it. The Apache config for the virtual host includes: SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /blah/blah/mysite.123.cert SSLCertificateKeyFile /blah/blah/mysite.123.key SSLCaCertificateFile /blah/blah/AlphaSSLroot.crt This differs from the instructions on 123-Reg's site: http://www.123-support.co.uk/support/answers/installing-your-ssl-apache-ope… .. but is working. I don't know the reasons behind or the implications of the differences. When I drop in the replacement mysite.123.cert, I get the following error_log: [error] Unable to configure RSA server private key [error] SSL Library Error: 185073780 error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch Frustratingly, "apache2 -t" does not report any config errors but this problem crashes the server. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

9 18

Embedded Linux boxen for VPN access
by Mark Rogers 24 Jun '10

24 Jun '10

Suppose I have a network device (not a PC, but it talks TCP/IP - eg a printer, although in this case it'll be some industrial hardware), and I want to install it on a customer's site in such a way that I want to be able to securely access it remotely with minimal changes at the customer's site. One option is to have a little black box which makes an outbound connection through the site's Internet connection to connect to a VPN, and in doing so providing access to the network device. Any suggestions for that little black box, and for how to configure it? I am assuming of-course that the little black box will be Linux based. I have seen some industrial solutions which (I think) allow both the client (some block in an office at his PC) and the device to set up a small peer-to-peer secure network using a third party mediation server to allow the connections to establish (similar to the ways that stuff like Skype, Hamachi, etc work). However they're very expensive (typically £500+ at each end) and I'd rather have something I have more control over anyway. (If that means running my own mediation server that's not necessarily a problem.) However, there may be simpler options: the black box connects to the office's PPTP VPN, and creates a local NAT'ed subnet with port forwarding through the NAT router to allow device access, etc. (If it sounds like I'm waffling it's because I don't really know what I'm talking about :-) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

7 16

Re: [ALUG] Up for grabs...
by Montmorency 21 Jun '10

21 Jun '10

On Mon, 21 Jun 2010, at 12:00 pm, main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:27:45 +0100 > From: Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist(a)digimatic.co.uk> > Subject: Re: [ALUG] Up for grabs... > To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > Message-ID: <4C1E4181.8040108(a)digimatic.co.uk> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > On 20/06/10 16:28, Bellphegore wrote: >> Flexible, roll-up, rubber, USB keyboard. >> >> Red (in case that matters). >> >> Say, and it's yours at the next pub-meet. >> > > (holds up hand) > > Me me me, I might even buy you a pint :) > OK.... katsmeat montmorency(a)ukfsn.org bellphegore(a)nerdshack.com

1 0

Arduino Help
by James Bensley 21 Jun '10

21 Jun '10

Is my Arduino duffed or me? Started a new project today, hooked up a 16x2 LCD, and a potentiometer. To start with the screen is simply displaying the reading from the pot with analogRead("PotPinNumber") but its fluctuating like mad: Here is a video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgEm7czlUVg YT has cut eh quality so it isn't very clear!), to start with I have turned the pot to max and you can see the fluctuation in the reading, then I unplug the pot from the analog input so it should be reading nothing but it drops to about 450 and fluctuates around there when surely it should drop to 0 (mystery voltage from somewhere perhaps?), then I plug the pot back in the analog input and you can see it go back up and fluctuate. This is the case irrelevant of which port the pot is plugged into and weather it is plugged in or not it still reads something? Is the Arduino dead or am I dead? -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ - There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand trinary, those who don't understand trinary and those who don't understand trinary.

5 8

Locating duplicate images (fslint?)
by Mark Rogers 21 Jun '10

21 Jun '10

I have an "images" directory with several subdirectories (and sub-sub-directories), one of them called "products". Pretty much every image in the "products" directory is a duplicate of an image in the parent "images" directory or one of its other subdirectories, although with a different filename (binary contents will be the same, and there's a good chance that the timestamp will also be the same although this is not guaranteed). I want to locate the duplicates, and remove them - the ones I must keep are the ones in the "products" subdirectory. Ideally I'd like to move the duplicates into a temporary directory (retaining their sub-directory paths) rather than delete them in case I need to restore them, but deletion wouldn't be too bad (I can take backups first, although it's on a hosted server and the "images" directory is 1.1G, with free space on the server a little less than that, so just duplicating the directory won't be as easy as it might sound - the lack of free space is one of the main reasons I need to do this!). Oh, and there are some sub-directories I'd like to exclude. So: Which tools should I look at? fslint springs to mind but I've never really used it in anger and the documentation seems a bit vague. The GUI option is out because there's no X on the server. Are there other, better (more appropriate) tools? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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